DOS Games Discussion

I just downloaded king's quest 6 from Kazaa, but every time I start the game it tells me that it can't activate my audio hardware, and there's no sound. does anyone have any advice for me on how to fix this problem? I'm running windows Me, and my soundcard is a soundblaster live.

Hi Neruda,

I would guess that your Soundblaster Live doesn't have "legacy sound" support properly installed or configured.

If you go to Control Panel, System, Device Manager, Sound Video and Game Controllers is there an entry listed that has "legacy" listed in it? Or, if you highlight your computer in Device Manager and select Properties what's listed under IRQ5?

You need to set up your SoundBlaster so that it's providing legacy sound support on IRQ5, DMA1 with address ranges starting at 220, 330 and/or 380.

The easy way to do this would be to make sure you have a copy of the latest driver unzipped somewhere handy. Then select all your sound card's entries in Device Manager and select "Remove". Reboot and Windows will redetect and reinstall your sound card.

Hope this is somewhere near the mark. Post again if your Live already has legacy support enabled on IRQ5 and I'll research further.

Procerus, thanks for the reply. When I go to the device manager and hit sound video and game controllers, I only see two things: Creative sblive! value and game port for creative sblive!. When I highlighted computer and hit properties, I didn't see anything that said IRQ5. Does that mean that I'll have to reinstall the sound card?

Try "removing" the card from Device Manager and rebooting. At worst you'll just end up where you are now.

Alternatively try downloading the latest driver set for your card and operating system from Creative and run the driver's install program.

I can't believe that the Live wouldn't have legacy support by default but it's possible that the Creative installer may offer it as an option during the install process.

I use VDMS sound, link to it found

http://www.dosgames.com/xphints.php

Once it's installed, just right-click your games executable and select open with VDMS.

I haven't tried this with Kings Quest games yet. It has enabled the sound in all my dos games so far, though.

procerus, you are so smart and cool. ^^